discussion
The underlying focus of this volume considers the power of personal names, naming-as-assignation, and naming as speech. In order to examine any of these, we argue, all three aspects should remain in view. At the same time, however, our discussion also points to the importance of making an initial intellectual separation into distinct fields of inquiry. Names need to be considered as things. Sometimes they are thought to reflect the true person-within-the-body in which case it is often thought...
Speech Acts and Language as Code
Although Kripke builds on what he considers the crucial importance of a continuous speech community, he does not distinguish the kinds of speech acts naming encompasses. What it means to give a name and to speak a name provide significantly separate entry points into a cross-cultural analysis of names and naming. We turn, then, to more linguistic treatments of naming as speech. Ricoeur 1976 points out that, as the source of significant context, the meaning of a word is open, pointing to the...
studying pregnancy loss support
The first pregnancy loss support groups were established in the United States in the mid-1970s. During the 1980s such groups spread quickly throughout the country. By 1993 there were over 900 such groups SHARE 1993 . By 2000 the numbers had dropped to 709 SHARE 2000 due to the advent of web-based support and the pregnancy loss movement's success in encouraging hospitals to offer better support. My research between 1986-2002 focused on three support organizations UNITE, a regional group with...
introduction
The high profile of names and naming systems onomastics is a distinctive hallmark of the ethnographic literature on lowland South America. Names were typically excluded from anthropological research on kinship - witness textbooks on the subject - but when it came to the complex social structures of the Ge and Bororo or the Kariera-like section systems of the Panoans, relations predicated on the transfer of names turned out to be of crucial significance.1 Following pioneering work on these...
Teknonyms
The end of the period of childhood, when the personal name is appropriate, is theoretically brought about by marriage. Marriage in the Zafimaniry sense however, is not a change brought about in a moment but it is a long process drawn out over many years. It requires the building of a house and its defining factor is parenthood. One cannot be truly married until one has had, at the very least, one child. Both the establishment of a house and parenthood are necessary, but it is the parental...
Teknonymy and the Evocation of the Social Among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar
Names are words, and as words they are constituent elements in speech acts. Alone, or in combination with other linguistic phenomena, they are sounds that, as a result of the conventions learnt by speakers of a particular community, evoke in the minds of hearers or speakers' mental responses see the chapter by Lambek Chapter 6 for a very similar theoretical position . It is important to begin a discussion of names in this rather pedantic way because, too often, names are considered in the...
conclusion
When starting my analysis of names among the Orokaiva and inspired by the current literature on Melanesia, I was expecting my paper to highlight an exchange system dealing with names considered as constitutive parts of persons. However, in the end, a totally different picture appeared. Here names have very little to do with personal characteristics rather, they pervade social life. They are names to be remembered and are not words of the language they attest to the truthfulness of stories they...
Why the Dead Do Not Bear Names The Orokaiva Name System
In what follows, I attempt to show that among the Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea, the use of a name system constitutes the morphological framework that maps the relations between people and groups through time. This, of course, does not mean that this system is intangible, but on the contrary, that while it is repeatedly reshaped by other dimensions of Orokaiva social life, like historical events, wars, individual endeavors and so forth, its capacity to preserve its general structure render these...
Your Child Deserves a Name Possessive Individualism and the Politics of Memory
In recent years, miscarriage, stillbirth, and early infant death have increasingly come to pose problems of meaning for middle-class Americans. What is the status of the woman, of her partner, of that which was lost Why did it happen What does it mean How ought one to behave The dominant strategy in the United States for dealing with this ambiguity is to minimize the loss. Medical explanations stress how common such events are, how insignificant they are in terms of predicting the outcome of a...
conclusion 1
It can be seen from this chapter that Tukanoan personal names form part of a set of ideas concerning different aspects or components of the body and person that can be expressed in the different registers of body blood, bone, flesh, and skin , ornament paint, feathers, and clothing , word names, language, spells, chants, and song , or metaphysical essence breath, vital spirit, soul, and shadow . Different kinds of personal name also relate to different spheres of social relations spirit names...
The Work of Kinship
Among Tatmul of New Guinea the naming system is indeed a theoretical image of the whole culture and in it every formulated aspect of culture is reflected Much of the early work already discussed recognized the institutionalized links among naming systems, kinship organization, and the political order as does the Bateson excerpt above . With the turning away from structural functionalism as well as from structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, this sort of tightly woven holistic analysis largely...
Contents
1. Entangled in Histories An Introduction to the Anthropology Barbara Bodenhorn and Gabriele vom Brack 2. Your Child Deserves a Name Possessive Individualism and the Politics of Memory in Pregnancy Loss 31 3. Why the Dead Do Not Bear Names The Orokaiva Name System 51 Andre Iteanu 4. The Substance of Northwest Amazonian Names 73 Stephen Hugh-Jones 5. Teknonymy and the Evocation of the Social Among the 6. What's in a Name Name Bestowal and the Identity of Spirits in Mayotte and Northwest...
Entangled in Histories An Introduction to the Anthropology of Names and Naming
barbara bodenhorn and Gabriele vom bruck Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, naming the victims and the culprits became an urgent matter. Lists of names -of living and dead - were posted daily. For some time there were names that could not be put with certainty in either category. And there were daunting traces of human bodies that could not be attached with certainty to a particular name. It is terrible to think that a person will go into the ground...
Preface and Acknowledgments
While this volume has been in preparation, we have discovered that if you scratch an anthropologist, you are likely to find a paper on names clambering for attention. In the autumn of 1999, ten anthropologists met for two days at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to talk about names and naming. Our institutional affiliations were international and our fieldwork experience spanned many regions across the globe. We asked what a focus on names and naming might bring to current anthropological thinking...
Sense Reference and the Problem of Descriptive Backing
Mill notes that Sophronicus and the father of Socrates are both names of the same object but with different meaning. The former identifies the man the latter tells us something about him 1974 981 . Frege 1949 uses the same kind of example to draw the distinction between sense and reference. Reference points to an object sense is the context that gives it meaning. Mr. Jones and Henry may or may not refer to the same person. Only with the context can we can judge whether or not the statement, Mr....
Contributors
SUSAN BENSON was a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge. She had a longstanding interest in questions of race and identity, gender, and the body. She is the author of Ambiguous Ethnicity Interracial Families in London 1981 and of articles on images of race and ethnicity in public discourse in the United Kingdom, and on bodily practices such as tattooing. Her recent research in Ghana centered on past and present African American Ghanian engagements with the legacy of slavery, primarily through tourism....